The nine Muses are commonly referred to as the goddesses of inspiration--how mundane and, well, uninspiring for those credited with the creativity inherent in human development of the arts and sciences that forms the basis of culture and civilization! Thus it is inconceivable that I would mention the Muses without considering their lineage. Fathered by Zeus, like so many Olympian offspring, it is their mother whose attributes imbue them with power. Mnemosyne is the goddess of memory and we must delve beneath the surface to find what she embodies beyond her appellation. Mnemosyne, pronounced ne-mos' e ne, engenders remembrance, or mindfulness in that she calls us to live in the moment, conscious of all the prior knowledge through which we tend to process our present experiences. Classical thought and literature evoke the past in our present and facilitate our weaving of our personal and humanity's experiences.
As my class officially begins its journey September 7, I am well aware that we all bring our histories with us and that C.J. Jung's belief that humans are born possessing a consciousness of humanity's communal past--what he termed the collective unconscious--should be interwoven with Socrates' assertion that humans possess all knowledge and that questioning will allow the necessary information to rise to the surface. I will begin today's first lesson with Theogony, in which Hesiod invokes the Muses and further devotes many lines to their influence on him and on the immortals whom he extols. Likewise, Homer begins The Odyssey, and The Iliad with invocations to the Muse--albeit in very different ways--and so I have my foundation as I model for students the myriad ways to integrate the past through Classical literature and identifying its DNA in our historical, social, and cultural framework.
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